For most of us, failure represents the stuff of nightmares. What will happen when there is no money in the bank account? Who will cover the bills? School fees and day care, insurance premiums, milk? When will they cutoff electricity, phone, natural gas and water? How bad is that eviction notice?

Starting with this list of questions Jawwad weaves a tale that takes readers from New York to California in search of the deepest fear of a new entrepreneur - What if I fail?

A touching confession that alternates between the bittersweet reality of a dying venture and the promise of multi million dollar valuations, the Blue Screen of Death is a journey of self discovery that every entrepreneur can relate to. It is a book of questions and answers that will force us to re-examine our personal prejuidices against failure.

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Read reviews about the first edition of Reboot (the Blue Screen of Death).

Download the first 25 pages from the first edition of Reboot (the Blue Screen of Death).

“Successful entrepreneurship is a long and winding road toward identifying and capturing opportunity. This book tells this story in a refreshing and personal way. The experience and the rich perspective on entrepreneurship make the book especially interesting for anyone thinking about a serious venture.”

“In Reboot, Jawwad Ahmed Farid, not only tells his personal journal from success to failure and back again, but he does it with wit and insight, and a self-deprecating humor that draws the reader in. More than just a story of one man’s struggle, the book is an examination of what truly constitutes success and failure, offering the insight that they are not so much opposites, as two aspects of the search for a righteous and honorable challenge. I am richer for having read it, and wish I could have many cups of tea with the author.”

Robert Ferrigno, New York Times bestselling author of the Prayers for the Assassin, Scavenger Hunt, the Wakeup and Heartbreaker

Refreshing, witty, down-to-earth, a totally delightful read - one of those rare 'cannot-put-down' books. The Blue Screen of Death gives young people a realistic insight into the world of the new breed of entrepreneurs - those who are born to lead and excel. The risk of failure is what keeps many of us from taking the plunge and starting our own ventures. Jawwad Farid gives us a totally new perspective - that failure should not be feared but embraced, that in fact it is the seed from which successful enterprises emerge.

Jawwad's journey into the unknown has been one of courage, commitment and unfaltering faith; and through it all he has amazingly been able to keep his sense of humour. That is probably what got him through the toughest times. This book is a must-read for all those budding entrepreneurs who are standing on the edge wondering whether they should leap into the magical world of startup ventures.

Jehan Ara, President, Pakistan Software Houses Association

“I clicked the link to the book’s online version mostly because of its uncanny title, but quickly found myself hooked to Jawwad’s simple, punchy and unpretentious writing style. One of my mentors told me once: “Don’t try to understand success – it often happens without much good reason. Failure, however, always has many good lessons”. Jawwad’s book embodies the essence of this wisdom.

Recently, I used The Blue Screen of Death for an Entrepreneurship course I teach at LUMS, replacing my standard choice of “Art of Start”. I found that while “Art of Start” was approached by students as a bible of “do’s and don’ts”, BSOD was more a story that almost everyone in the class could relate to. After reading the book, students wanted Jawwad to succeed and voluntarily engaged in passionate discussions on what they thought went wrong and how Jawwad could have been successful – a dream come true for a class on entrepreneurship!”

“Blue Screen of Death" by Jawwad A. Farid is a wonderful attempt by a young Pakistani entrepreneur to tell his story of his three failed ventures. It epitomizes the author's self-described fascination with studying failures--a quest that brought him to the brink of experiencing three of them over the last decade. Jawwad is among the rare breed of entrepreneurs who made a successful career in Pakistan, went to an Ivy League Business School, and returned back to succeed at doing something new in his own country. He may be rarest of the rare in that he has the courage to share the secrets of his failures in the most public of manners possible.

With this memoir of Jawwad has made several important breakthroughs in one go. At a personal level, Blue Screen describes the gripping tale of Jawwad's own ventures. For anyone who wants to learn about the fifteen years that it took to create Alchemy's "overnight" success, the book offers plenty of material to chew upon. It must take a lot of courage to lay bare your faults for the whole world to learn from. Jawwad does this in style that is both intimate and refreshing. At a more general level, Blue Screen is full of valuable advice for the aspiring entrepreneur or even those who have ventured before. I study new venture creation and management and I could not help but agree with several of the lessons drawn from Avicena's tragic failure. Many entrepreneurs would benefit from Jawwad's ruthless analysis of his failures and his attempt to learn from it.

Finally, Jawwad's book is a first for Pakistan in a very significant way. It is the first such attempt by a Pakistani entrepreneur to tell his story. This is partly due to fewer numbers of Pakistanis venturing on their own. Jawwad shatters this psychological barrier by not only owning but also proudly displaying his identity in a manner that is hard not to notice. I believe Jawwad's courage would inspire other Pakistani entrepreneurs to tell their stories as well.

Pakistan requires an inspirational world class success story to appear on the map of the world and be known as home to talented and hardworking people. Brimming with Jawwad's faith and positive-mindedness, Blue Screen is clearly a step in that direction. Jawwad deserves credit for this commendable effort.”

“Un-orthodox, truthful & courageous, Blue Screen of Death very skillfully combines textbook stuff with real life experience. Analyzing personal failure is always painful and almost impossible to be objective about, in his narrative, Jawwad divorces emotions yet somehow succeeds in retaining the passion. With a surgeon’s precision he peals the layers of Avicena to reveal the pathology which caused death of the company. From the dissecting table he moves on to the microscope to explore in detail what actually went wrong. Then he takes the reader along with him in drawing general & specific principles to be used as a guide for future entrepreneurs.

Talking about lessons learnt is à la mode in contemporary literature but Jawwad has gone a step further & shown us how to apply the wisdom of hind sight scientifically thereby reducing the emotional & economic cost of the failure.

With simple diction yet effortless prose this book gives a refreshing feeling. I believe books, like humans, also have different intelligence levels. If not brilliant this book most definitely can be ranked as smart.”

Sarmad Hasan, IUCN Pakistan

“Narrated as a mixture of the author’s own commentary, written in a very light-hearted and refreshing style, e-mail correspondences and IM sessions that portray various stages in the projects life are reproduced. There was high optimism during the hiring process, hope when reaching out to potential customers, refined rage when deadlines were not met by the technical team and a cheerful banter to keep friends posted on personal life.”

SPIDER Magazine, August 2008

‘Reboot – in search for the land of opportunity’ is not the sort of book you usually find on stores. Take a quick walk down the shelve-lanes of bookstores and you’d find hundreds of self-help books with success stories of lifetimes. While they’re a great inspiration for those still aspiring to venture into the harsh realities of life, they bid quite poor for those who have already tasted failure and those who are too optimistic to be realistic. In other words, for their authors, failures are the no-go zone of life, the hushed-up sentence, the forbidden word. And in staying from this forbidden fruit, they don’t as much as talk over it, or if it’s done, it’s just a chapter or two – for both in contemporary literature and culture, failure isn’t papyrus-selling. It’s rather sympathy-invoking, pity-arousing and well….definitely not a dear notion.

Not so for Jawwad Ahmed Farid and Reboot. After constructing the whole facet of Avicena, right from inception to progress to conclusion, the writer creates a world which we all could vividly realize and identify with – life with family, favors from friends, references through contacts, owned and loaned capital, tiny failures, daily boost-ups, toiling team-members and hopes of making it big-time eventually. And then, in one split-second, the author brings the entire facet crumbling down to pieces, quite the way failure hits. Suddenly and without a warning! Next comes an analysis of all the factors that contributed to this failure, whatever it took away and whatever it left to be valued all the more – charging it to the experience account, as the author would say.

All in all, a fine book to read, quite inspirational and above all, so well-told that nearly everyone can relate to it.